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Looks like McCain's signaling his intentions: Of course, Mr. McCain said, President Bush's nominee will be a conservative. "He campaigned for re-election and made no bones about the fact that it would be a conservative nominee," Mr. McCain said. "Elections have consequences." Indeed they do. More to the point, upcoming elections have consequences. And let's not forget how McCain's principles worked in 2000 (from the May 30th New Yorker ): McCain beat George W. Bush in New Hampshire, in a nineteen-point upset, but the storybook campaign ended when the Bush machine retaliated, in the infamous South Carolina primary. McCain had hoped that South Carolina's large veteran population would help him win there; but the Christian Coalition, deeply entrenched in the state, became the decisive constituency. Somewhat surprisingly, McCain had the support of Gary Bauer, the social conservative, who had dropped out of the race by that time. "I wanted a commitment from either George Bush or John...

I'm with Digby on this one. Brad's proposed trajectory for the Supreme Court fight -- Bush nominates lunatic, Democrats filibuster, Bush withdraws lunatic, nominates crazy, Democrats celebrate bipartisanship -- strikes me as wrong. Bush doesn't want to lose round one of this fight. Maybe if he was still riding 58% approval ratings he'd give it a shot, nominating the nuttiest necromancer he could find, but at 43% he's going to try and stroke his base while wedging Democrats into an impossible position. How do you do that? Nominate a hardline conservative wrapped in an electorally important minority. Hence, Emilio Garza .

So here's a question: can we actually block anyone that Bush wants? The last heroic victory was the rejection of Robert Bork, and that was pulled off by a 55-45 Democratic majority. I guess we can filibuster, at least assuming the nuclear option can be blocked, but what, realistically speaking, is the plan here? Make a judgment call, shut down the Senate over Luttig, and hope we win the aftermath? With party loyalty as strong as it is in this era -- even Janice Rogers Brown got confirmed, contrary to Graham's predictions that she wouldn't -- do Democrats have any possible chance of winning this without a filibuster?

Democrats are really off track with this "What's the Matter With Kansas" game. Andrei Cherny's new iteration of it just proves how much. Road tripping through the state, he stopped off in a small city, heard a story of a desperate women, and caromed off into ruminations about how we've failed the natives there. Why? First off, what is the matter with Kansas? Particularly as opposed to, say, Arkansas, or Tennessee, or Oregon. Kansas has middling unemployment (that's better than the presumably right-thinking California), a per capita income firmly in the nation's middle (Arkansas, incidentally, has the lowest), a female Democratic governor, and a poverty level 2.1% below the national average. So tell me again, what's the matter with Kansas? Because though we keep making the state sound like it's crammed with abortion-hating hicks too stupid to mark the ballot that'd help pull them out of poverty, none of that's actually going on. Instead, the real problem seems to be that the state just...

By now, you've surely heard that Sandra Day O'Connor is retiring. Yikes. A Rehnquist retirement would've been a fight, but O'Connor's seat is going to provoke a bloody, balls-out battle, as her successor can swing the court decisively to the right. Update : Shakespeare's Sister has a rundown of some of the potential replacements. McConnell and Roberts are here , Wilkinson, Luttig, and Alito here . Luttig, fyi, is thought by many to be the most likely choice. I'm rooting for Gonzales myself. In this case, the torturer is the least scary of the bunch.

Kevin's right , Open CRS , the new site collecting the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service's policy summaries, is a great service. The CRS is a taxpayer funded agency that prepares reports on various policy topics for congressmen. The reports are short, highly reliable, and scrupulously fair. Better yet, there are thousands of them, with more emerging each year. Like Kevin, I've long been irritated that the CRS doesn't make its reports public. After all, we pay for them. Indeed, I was even thinking of proposing a 10 Miles Squared ( The Washington Monthly's front-of-book, talk-about-something-quirky-in-DC feature) on it. But then, you've got to think; maybe it's a good thing. After all, let the CRS go public and suddenly Accuracy in Media or the Media Research Council devotes an intern to reading every single dispatch and raising huge stinks about out of context sentences proving liberal bias aimed at weak-minded congressmen. They become just one more political football, and...

Via Lindsay Beyerstein , Richard Chapelle is compiling personality/political profiles of bloggers. Personality is being done through the IPIP-NEO inventory , and politics through the ubiquitous political compass quiz. Should be fun. My results, complete with commentary, are behind the jump:

Bad news in the new Zogby poll , at least if your name is Bush. Not only was there no bounce in Bush's speech, but the red states have turned against him and 42% of voters say they'd want congress to begin impeachment proceedings if only they knew about the Downing Street Memos. That's not going to happen, of course, not with a Republican majority. But if the media was serious about pushing the story in the way they pressed Whitewater, it'd prove a real danger to the administration. The very fact, however, that Zogby is polling questions of impeachment shows that the memos are gaining traction. This is the sort of thing the media loves to report: numbers, information, artifacts that make their stories look driven by news rather than editors. And 42%, for that matter, is a very high number. How many media organizations pick up on it and how hard they push it will say a lot about how constant media coverage is between administrations.

David Broder has a surprisingly good column on the reversed PBS cuts, arguing that the zeal to save Big Bird might have hurt the kids he teaches. The $100 million in restored cuts had to come from elsewhere, and so they did: None of this suggests that the House was wrong to rescue Big Bird and his friends in public broadcasting. But it is a fact, as both Regula and Obey pointed out, that the broadcast stations and their audiences have far more influence on Congress than most low-income Americans possess. As Obey put it, "At least the people who pay attention to public broadcasting do have a megaphone of sorts, and they can get their message known." Obey was also on sound ground in pointing out that "the press has focused 90 percent of its attention on public broadcasting," playing down or ignoring the trade-offs that were forced in other programs by the strictures of the budget plan pushed by President Bush and approved by party-line Republican majorities in Congress. ... It's one...

James Hamilton, talking about Mitt Romney's attempts to restructure health care by ending free medical care in emergency rooms but subsidizing the needy, writes : Even so, I count it as progress of sorts if we might in this fashion find ourselves at least able to agree on what we want to buy, leaving just the little matter of haggling over the price. A proposal like Romney's strikes me as a constructive way to frame a public discussion of exactly where America stands on who should pay the medical costs of the uninsured. I don't know about that. Outside of the blogosphere, it's fairly impressive how much of the health care debate really is about haggling over prices. The constituency actively pushing single-payer in this country is quite small, in large part due to fears about its political viability. Moreover, support for health care entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, is widely bipartisan, almost sacrosanct. Even with a budget deficit spiraling rapidly out of control...